WASHINGTON / Congress passes CalFed water bill after 4-year delay / Program designed to balance needs of farmers, cities

Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, October 8, 2004

2004-10-08 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- Congress voted final approval Wednesday to long-delayed legislation that renews the state-federal program designed to improve the health of San Francisco Bay and the delta and provide more water for Central Valley growers and rapidly growing communities in central and Southern California.

The final voice vote in the House to send the $389 million, five-year bill to President Bush for his expected signature came after some last-minute intervention by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. On Tuesday night, he spoke by telephone with Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, chairman of the House Resources Committee, and pledged to find money to pay for feasibility studies on big new water storage projects, including the expanded Los Vaqueros Reservoir in eastern Contra Costa County and an enlarged Shasta Dam, Pombo said.

The reauthorization for CalFed, the unique program first created in 1994 as a way of ending California's legal water wars and to meet the state's competing needs for precious water, had been a key legislative goal this year for Pombo and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. It was a Senate version of the CalFed legislation the House finally accepted Tuesday, ending a decade of deadlock in Washington.

Without the reauthorization legislation, projects under the CalFed umbrella would grind to a halt. The existing authorization expired in 2000, and no new federal money has been authorized for CalFed in the past four fiscal years.

The agreement involved reconciling the many sides in the water-hungry state -- environmentalists worried about the health of the bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, farmers who need water to maintain California's $27 billion a year agricultural industries, and communities to the south that need a reliable source of water, especially now that the multistate Colorado River compact will cut by 15 percent the amount of river water California will receive over the next 15 years.

"This is a rare day," Feinstein told reporters after the House vote. "It's a bipartisan press conference on a bipartisan bill that benefits California enormously."

"I feel real good about this," Pombo said after the House vote. "We finally got to the point where House members feel we all will get better together."

Pombo, a rancher who represents a booming suburban area, said more reservoirs are the key to providing water to the state's increasing population.

"I agree with Chairman Pombo," said Feinstein. "You cannot solve California's water problems without being able to hold water from good years for bad years."

But even with agreement on finishing the studies, it will be many years before construction begins for expanded Los Vaqueros or Shasta reservoirs. And that's only if lawsuits don't further delay work.

The end game for negotiating the legislation began in July when the House passed an earlier version of the bill. Among its most controversial features, one objected to by many Bay Area House members, was preauthorization for the big water storage projects. Environmentalists fear that diverting more water to new reservoirs will damage the delicate ecological balance in the bay and delta.

In the Senate, preauthorization was rejected immediately, not for environmental reasons but because senators want to keep the power to authorize major construction projects and appropriate money for them. The solution in Feinstein's bill was to continue studies for the storage projects and to instruct the secretary of the interior to annually certify that all aspects of the CalFed program are moving along together, meaning that storage isn't falling by the wayside.

Environmentalists say reservoirs aren't the way to ensure California's water future. They advocate conservation, recycling and desalinization projects.

To win support of the other Western senators whose states also want expensive water storage projects to cope with lingering drought and growing populations, Feinstein cut the price tag for CalFed from more than $800 million to $389 million.

The lone note of dissent on the House floor came from Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez. He said he worried that the Interior Department has been negotiating long-term contracts to move huge quantities of Northern California water to the south outside of the agreements set up by CalFed.

"I am pleased that the House has finally passed CalFed legislation, which I hope will help strike a needed balance in the operation of California's important water systems," said Miller, former chairman of the Resources Committee.

But, he added, "the Department of the Interior has refused to meet California's changing water needs, and is finalizing water contracts without meeting basic benchmarks of fiscal responsibility, and without adequately documenting their environmental impact."